It's been years since I posted. Looks like my HD Series 3 is finally up. A couple questions beforehand:
1) I'm getting the GSOD and continuous reboot. Is that an indication of a bad hard drive?
2) Does TiVo not do transfers of lifetime service anymore? A quick chat w/ TiVo customer service seemed that to be the case.

Frankly it makes for poor customer service. Can someone please send me an image for HD Series 3 TCD648250B? Also where can I find latest upgrade instructions (last time I did this was maybe +4 years ago on a series 2...)

The problem is definitely the hard drive. My EZSMART bios thingy told me that my hard drive was bad. When i try to the copy, the drive it failed to. Surprising it allowed me overwrite over the drive. (oops!)

I did a careful inspection on my power supply and those battery thingy look fine and were not bulging.

Nevertheless, after loading the image and going through Error 51 and rebooting and clearing the data/programing, it is now working fine.

You were actually able to get the SendSpace links to work for the 540 files?

Did you download both the WinMFS and MFS Live versions?

If not, download the other one to keep it in play longer as well.

It takes a lot longer for me to upload than for someone to download.

Oh, by the way, while you've got the TiVo apart, before you do anything to the original drive, you need to consider the possibility that the drive is fine and that the problem is the TiVo power supply.

It's been years since I posted. Looks like my HD Series 3 is finally up. A couple questions beforehand:
1) I'm getting the GSOD and continuous reboot. Is that an indication of a bad hard drive?
2) Does TiVo not do transfers of lifetime service anymore? A quick chat w/ TiVo customer service seemed that to be the case.

Frankly it makes for poor customer service. Can someone please send me an image for HD Series 3 TCD648250B? Also where can I find latest upgrade instructions (last time I did this was maybe +4 years ago on a series 2...)

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Can't help you with the image for that particular model, but allow me to suggest that you get the diagnostic software from the manufacturer of the drive itself and run the long test to establish if the problem is a physical problem with the drive or if it's the TiVo software on the drive that has gotten scrambled.

Also, while you've got the TiVo opened up, you need to visually inspect the power supply.

Go read the wikipedia article on "capacitor plague" and check out badcaps.net as well to learn what to look for.

The MFS Live cd v1.4 and the WinMFS program can both be useful in seeing if the drive has software problems, and both are available at mfslive.org

A word of warning, if your PC has a GigaByte brand motherboard let us know so we can tell you how to avoid having it put a Host Protected Area on your TiVo drive and any replacement drive you might use.

Looks like the last time I was in the community was in 2003 when I was trying to revive my ancient DirecTivo. When I dropped DirecTV so I could upgrade to HD cable, I decided that I didn't need to hack my tivos to add more space anymore, so I haven't been following the community anymore. Of course, now that my drive has died, I've come crawling back begging for help once again.

I think its great that the community is still going strong after all of these years!

Recently had both my Tivo drives fail. Any help with an image for a
Philips ptv300 and a Philips SD-H400 would be much Appreciated.
Thank you very much!

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I have an image that you could use for the PTV300 but it is over 6GB in size. Not sure why it is so large given that the S2 and above images I have are all less than 400MB. Anyway, unless someone else has one that is smaller, the only way I can think to get it to you is if you send me an 8GB or larger flash drive or SDHC card. I am willing to load the image and mail it back. If interested, send me an e-mail. You won't be able to PM until you get at least 10 posts.

I found the Supafly torrent, but it's claiming 11 days to finish, and if I don't get the TV working again soon, my preschooler may have a total meltdown.

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The Supafly torrent sped up quite a bit. Looks like a few more seeders appeared, and I was able to get it restored onto a 500GB disk I had lying around, and I'm going through the setup now.

Hopefully I won't have any CableCard issues. I've heard that Verizon FIOS doesn't do any sort of locking of the cards to the TiVo, so it "should" work fine even though I am starting with a virgin disk image. I guess I'll find out shortly.